The de-selection of Beth Winter, one of Wales’ most important socialist MPs in a generation, is part of a wider purge of leftwingers in the party under the leadership of Keir Starmer. But it also highlights the failure of the Labour left to defend itself. In this long read, SC Cook looks at why this is happening and argues for a different approach.
By SC Cook. Cover image: Beth Winter addresses a rally of NHS workers in Cardiff, 2020, by Mehek Seth.
The defeat of the Labour MP Beth Winter by her right wing rival in the contest to represent the new Merthyr Tydfil and Upper Cynon parliamentary seat is a serious defeat for the left in Wales.
But it is part of a wider pattern in Labour that poses questions for socialists everywhere and throws harsh light on the approach of the left in the party.
Winter was the only Welsh MP in a generation who genuinely talked the language of socialism and stood out from an otherwise bland crop of politicians.
Winter not only backed striking workers, she organised rallies and events in their support, in open defiance of Keir Starmer who said that Labour MPs shouldn’t even visit picket lines.
Most notably, she invited Mick Lynch to speak in Aberdare, where the RMT leader called for a general strike and Winter slammed the super rich.
She took up even riskier positions on subjects that are now off limits in Labour, such as attacking the police, supporting Kill the Bill protesters and criticising Western foreign policy.
At a time when working class people face both state repression and further impoverishment through soaring inflation, losing one of the few MPs prepared to fight their corner is a major blow.
How has this happened?
The Labour Party has become an arena in which socialists are isolated, disempowered and hounded out.
In a recent article in the Financial Times, Keir Starmer’s inner circle was profiled. Of the 31 unelected figures, only one had any formal links with the Corbyn period, a minor role in Momentum when they were a student.
Many of the others, including Tony Blair himself, would not look out of place at the IMF, Davos or neoconservative circles in the US. These are the people who now have the most influence in Labour, and they aren’t afraid to use it.
The piece recalls one case that typifies the assault on the left:
In Broxtowe in the East Midlands, a leftwing councillor called Greg Marshall who was Labour candidate in 2017 and 2019 did not make the seat’s shortlist despite being backed by eight unions.
He was shown an official dossier, which claimed he had “liked” eight supposedly problematic tweets, some opposing “unfair suspensions” in the party.
Instead, the local constituency party was presented with three candidates with little political experience in the region: the winner had most recently been a councillor in Lewisham, south London.
Winter is a casualty of this purge as well.
Another is Jamie Driscoll, the North of Tyne Labour mayor who has been barred from re-standing after he appeared on a panel about films in the North of England with Ken Loach, one of the few filmmakers to consistently focus on the area.
Like Sam Tarry – who was de-selected as Ilford South candidate after being sacked from the Shadow Cabinet for backing the RMT strike – Driscoll is more of a traditional social democrat. The pair wouldn’t have dared to have taken up positions against NATO or in support of Kill the Bill protesters.
But even being on the so-called soft left is now cause for being targeted by the Starmer machine, which, like Blair’s Labour, is imposing its own candidates regardless of what local Labour members want.
Significantly, Starmer is openly dismissing candidates who have the backing of major trade unions, even ones affiliated to Labour and which provide millions in funds.
Starmer is pursuing both an internal and external strategy. Internally, he is seeking to place the Labour left into a ‘sealed tomb’ – the phrase once used by Peter Mandleson who is now one of Starmer’s closest advisors. But he is also performing a wider function for the British ruling class.
Whereas Corbynism saw a heightening of class antagonism through the leadership campaigns in 2015 and 2016, and the 2017 manifesto, Starmerism acts to suppress this.
Part of his job is to significantly limit people’s expectations of what is possible and reaffirm the idea that no real alternative exists to British capitalism.
Starmer’s route to power lies precisely through large sections of the working class feeling disaffected and disengaged, because Labour are not relying on some kind of political earthquake to get them into power. Instead, his managerial, negative approach reflects a cynical desire to see only a small shift in voting patterns that can hand Labour a healthy majority.
As a result, Starmer is seen by the establishment as a safe pair of hands and he receives overwhelmingly soft press coverage.
What about Wales?
People could be forgiven for thinking that things were different in Wales, where the party is seen as to the left of the leadership in England, and has generally avoided the bitter attacks on socialist members.
But that theory was shown to be false when the Welsh Labour Executive pushed through an election timetable that favoured Beth Winter’s right wing rival, who just so happens to be a Labour whip.
Bizarrely, an in-person hustings was banned by the executive, leaving Winter with little opportunity to win over Labour members in Gerald Jones’ Merthyr Tydfil constituency. Jones, who keeps a fairly low profile, undoubtedly benefited from the unusually paired down campaign.
It was quite clear who senior figures in Welsh Labour wanted. Starmer has enough loyalists in the Welsh leadership, such as Joe Stevens, MP for Cardiff Central, to override the reported wishes of the Welsh First Minister, Mark Drakeford, who favoured a proper election contest.
To attempt to shift the result in Jones’s favour and rob Wales of one of its only socialist MPs is shameful.
Just two days before Winter discovered her fate, new figures released showed that at least one in five children live in poverty in all Welsh local authorities.
Yet Labour are choosing candidates that offer nothing to these children and their families.
Even when their parents take the decision to strike for better pay, Labour looks the other way. As hundreds of thousands of public sector workers went on strike on budget day, 15th March, Gerald Jones sent out eight messages on Twitter, but not one even mentioned the walkouts, let alone supported them.
Emboldened by the Winter defeat, the Welsh party has decided that Chris Evans – currently the MP for Islwyn – will be automatically selected as the Labour candidate for Caerphilly, robbing local members of a chance to select their own candidate.
But simply crying foul at the tactics of the right in Labour is not enough.
Whilst Winter was at a disadvantage, she nevertheless still should have won. Turnout was very high, at 84%, which in itself should have benefited Winter.
Given Winter’s record compared to Jones’, it’s hard to see how even a slim majority of Labour members could not have chosen her as their preferred candidate.
So whilst on one level it’s possible just to point the finger at Starmer and his allies in Wales, we need to look elsewhere as well.
The failure of the Labour left’s approach
The approach of the Labour left must be questioned here. Outlining anything approaching a strategy is difficult, but at its core the party’s left is about trying to build the socialist current within Labour in order to either win power with a socialist government or have a strong socialist influence on a Labour administration.
On both tests, the left is failing catastrophically; indeed, going backwards.
One big problem with this approach is that it’s highly internalised and sees Labour as the main arena of political battle.
When the left appears to be winning, it’s easier to justify. But when it’s in a state of serious decline, the story is different.
The overall effect of the steady stream of expulsions and de-selections of socialists is to put left-wing Labour activists in a state of paralysis on key political questions.
There is justified fear of expulsion for speaking out against what Starmer is doing, or appearing with Ken Loach, or even simply liking a tweet by Nicola Sturgeon or some other innocuous social media post years ago.
So it’s hardly surprising that many Labour members feel silenced, when to lose their membership would compromise their central aim of staying in Labour and changing it from within.
And this is a culture that trickles down from the senior left figures in the party. When even the MPs in the Socialist Campaign Group (SCG) find it difficult to properly defend Jeremy Corbyn from being purged, the effect on ordinary left wing members is obvious.
One member in south Wales recently told me what their local constituency meetings were like: “We can’t discuss anything. It’s quite remarkable. We weren’t allowed to discuss Jeremy Corbyn being de-selected for example, it would have been shut down. It’s become a really closed forum for debate”
Labour has indeed become utterly toxic for socialists. Even if figures like Winter can criticise the process, they rarely are able to go further and attack the political approach of Starmer.
So the cycle continues: more silence only invites more attacks and so on, leaving the left in a state of permanent decline and defensiveness. The contrast to the right is stark. When they gained power through Starmer, they immediately went about dismantling the left. But during a comparable period for the left, in the aftermath of the 2017 election, it failed to tackle the right.
Take the recent example of Starmer attack dog Paul Richards appearing on Newsnight to slander Jamie Driscoll. Richards made the absurd suggestion that Driscoll should have turned a panel about film, organised by a cultural organisation, into an opportunity to accuse Ken Loach of being a racist.
But was there ever a moment when a Corbynite Labour MP would have made a similar suggestion about a Labour politician appearing alongside Tony Blair, even though it would be far more justified?
The answer is no, there was almost always an attempt to appease the right and bring them into the tent instead.
We can say clearly now that it was a strategy that failed then and it is failing even more so today. Even in the most optimistic hopes of the Labour left, they stand no chance of regaining any semblance of power in the coming decade.
Even leading socialists in the party don’t seem to grasp what is happening to them.
John Trickett, a leftwing Labour MP and regular writer for Tribune, recently tried to defend the Labour left by saying this: “Harold Wilson, who won four elections, often said that like a bird, in order to fly Labour needed both a right wing and a left wing.”
But when your side is being run into the ground by an operation that wants to permanently destroy you, asking them to play nice is laughable.
The effects outside the Labour Party
Another question to ask is: what effect does all this have on politics outside the Labour Party, and the left’s ability to build a serious base of opposition to the Tories, ecological disaster, war, grotesque inequality and so on?
“The left” in this context refers to the large group of people who threw their support behind Jeremy Corbyn, if not joining it then arguing for a Corbyn government or knocking doors for one.
This left has struggled to re-orientate itself since December 2019 and is still to some degree within the orbit of Labourism, even if many have left the party.
Prominent left figures in the party – such as those in the SCG who form the rump of Corbynism in the party – also still hold some kind of leadership status among the very large number of people who made up the movement behind the former Labour leader.
So when these figures quickly withdrew their names from a Stop the War statement for condemning Nato as well as Russia over Ukraine, the inevitable effect was to weaken criticism of Western foreign policy more generally.
Again, this is because ultimate priority is given to staying in Labour, even if it means you can’t speak freely on the biggest escalation of global conflict in a generation.
The same dynamic can be seen in the Palestinian question, where the charge of antisemitism over criticism of Israel instils a fear of speaking out and organising around BDS.
This inertia is strengthened by the constant defeats over these issues seen within the Labour party, where the right are totally dominant.
There are other areas, such as opposition to racist border policies or authoritarian policing measures that are also affected.
What the Labour Party is doing is suppressing political conflict at a time when the left should be meeting the class assault head on in a way that sections of the working class are showing a willingness to.
Instead, the Enough is Enough campaign, which is linked to the trade union bureaucracy and the Labour left, failed to do this despite tapping into a groundswell of political support for striking workers (over half a million people joined the campaign within its first month).
What had the potential for a thriving movement of rank and file workers, trade unionists and their supporters against the Tory government failed to live up to the hype. At the time of writing, the only event listed on their website was six months ago. This is despite the fact that there have been several major strike days in this time. The network of members has rarely been called upon to organise local solidarity demonstrations or even collect money for a strike fund. It’s a situation that can only be described as wasteful.
Conclusion
Overall, the decision of the Labour left to prioritise reselection and survival in the parliamentary Labour party has been a calamity over the last couple of years, and it has meant that rather than using their energy to build and develop resistance to the Tory government, they have been timid and at best gestural in their opposition. Ironically, this approach has even failed on its own terms, and only led to more attacks from the right.
How we achieve something different is a question that can’t be answered by one article, but identifying the problem is a start.
It does not mean a demand that people leave the Labour Party, but it does mean not being bound by Labourism, and the distant hope that the Labour left will rise again, as the primary aim.
Leading socialist parliamentarians in Labour should be using their platform to raise key political demands and mobilising a base of support outside the party and outside of the electoral timetable, even if this means getting kicked out.
Beth Winter was effective at doing this, as are others such as the MP Zarah Sultana, but they are under constant threat.
Jamie Driscoll has been more effective at fighting back than others, which is why his cause is igniting more serious opposition to Starmerism, as seen in the letter defending the North of Tyne mayor signed by eight trade union general secretaries.
It’s crucial that this goes beyond a focus on Labour’s internal procedures though.
When Jeremy Corbyn was most successful in this, such as his 2016 re-election campaign, he didn’t wage a purely internal battle amongst the Labour membership. He held huge public rallies in towns and cities that raised demands that went beyond the confines of Labour and spoke to people at large. It was far better at both building a left and defeating the Labour right.
Starmer is relying on political disengagement on his route to power. He wants to marginalise socialist politics and kill any expectation that capitalism can be seriously challenged. In that mission he is strengthened by a Labour left who are fighting a losing battle.
At the very least, we must understand that this cycle has to be broken if we are to move forward in the fight against ecological and social catastrophe.
